Causes Of Poor Color Vision
Color blindness is a condition that affects many people and prevents them from distinguishing colors well. But what causes it?
Poor color vision, better known as color blindness, refers to the difficulty in perceiving and distinguishing colors. For this reason, many people confuse colors such as blue, yellow, red or green. The question that all comes to mind is what is the cause of this problem?
Some articles indicate that up to 8% of the population suffers from this vision problem. This is a fairly high percentage and, surely, all of us know someone with poor color vision. However, let’s see what can cause this condition.
What Causes Poor Color Vision?
As we have well pointed out, color blindness is a difficulty in seeing colors and differentiating them. It is considered, as the study of a genetic anomaly indicates: color blindness , a genetic defect.
The way it is transmitted is through an X chromosome that is affected with this condition. Sometimes you can be a carrier and transmit poor color vision without suffering from it.
From what has been seen so far, the presence of color blindness is much more frequent in men than in women. This is because women have two X chromosomes. For them to be color blind, it is necessary that both chromosomes are affected. Otherwise, they will not suffer from poor color vision.
Although in the vast majority of cases color blindness has a genetic cause, there is the possibility that it manifests due to dyschromatopsia, a vision disorder that causes the same as color blindness but originates due to some damage in the optic nerve or retina.
In other circumstances, Alzheimer’s disease can cause difficulties in perceiving colors.
Likewise, some medications aimed at treating erectile dysfunction or different psychological problems can also cause poor color vision. In the event that we are exposed to chemical substances in our work, it is necessary to protect the eyes well, since they can be affected with the loss of color vision.
Types of color blindness
When a person has poor color vision, they will also be diagnosed with a specific type of color blindness. Not all are the same and not all affect the life of the patient in the same way. Therefore, we are going to see the ones that are currently available below:
- Achromatic : it is characterized because the person does not distinguish any color, his vision is only in black and white.
- Dichromatic : it is difficult to perceive the color green, blue or red.
- Trichromatic : the 3 primary colors are perceived, but they are confused with each other.
Typically, people with poor color vision are diagnosed with dichromatism or trichromatism. Having achromatic vision is something quite unusual, since our eyes are prepared to perceive colors (something that does not happen in animals).
Treatment possibilities
Something that we must be clear about is that poor color vision currently has no cure. In fact, most people get used to the way they perceive colors without significantly affecting their life.
This is different in those who suffer from achromatism. The fact of not distinguishing any color can cause considerable impediments and limitations. However, people with color blindness develop different techniques to distinguish, for example, the colors of a traffic light.
We may be familiar with the glasses for the color blind that became a hope for people who suffered from poor color vision. However, this is not a treatment, but a tool that, for example, for achromatic people does not work.
What these glasses do is filter the colors between blue and green reducing shadows that can cause confusion. Therefore, they work very well in dichromatic people. However, they are not a treatment and the color blind person will have to live their whole life with this condition.
Are you color blind? Have you been diagnosed with poor color vision? We hope that this article has allowed you to understand a little better this genetic defect, in most cases, that many people around us can suffer from.
